Welcome back to part 10 of the Liberty Basic Beginning Programming Series. We have covered a lot of the basic concepts involved in programming, and we are rapidly approaching some more intermediate material. For the next few installments of the series we will be delving into the concepts behind game-related graphics. This month we will look at simple animation as applied to games such as pong and the like.

Liberty Basic actually supports a more advanced type of game oriented graphics based on Sprites. Sprites are independent graphic elements that are manipulated as if they lay on top the graphic window's background. I wanted to get into these in this article, but the material is just too much to get in. We will be developing our knowledge of basic graphics this time, as well as more programming skills - how to tackle and solve big problems, by breaking them into smaller, more manageable problems. We will look into Sprites - why and how they work in a future installment (perhaps the next one), but first a small sales pitch: Alyce Watson has been producing her award winning series (it should have won some awards anyway!) "SpriteByte" in the LB Newsletter for several months now - it deals with various aspects of using sprites. If you want to get a head start on the subject, I highly recommend reading up on the series. We will try to begin to move into using sprites in Part XI next time we meet. It will give a firm foundation on sprite operation and will make our going much smoother.

You will remember that last time we worked on a calculator program, as we covered in greater detail the aspects of programming as they relate to using windows controls, like buttons and labels and textboxes. We also concluded with a challenge to enhance the calculator program we worked on. I am hoping that many of you took me up on that challenge. As I say every time - you learn by doing. As you attempt to complete the challenges, you stretch yourself as a programmer. We are not going to be working through these possible enhancements; they were part of a private challenge. If you need help with the process, please visit us out on the Liberty Basic forum at [http://libertybasic.conforums.com]

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